


This Dark Thing

by WhenasInSilks



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-adjacent, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Manipulative Hannibal, Misunderstandings, No One Helps Will Graham, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-16 13:14:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9273392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: Will killed Garret Jacob Hobbs on a Sunday—ten rounds to the chest, no hesitation, no remorse. It wasn’t until the next morning that he saw it—a stag’s head, black as if it had been seared into his chest, the antlers branching across once-unblemished skin like the roots of some great tree. At thirty-four years of age, Will had found his soulmate. His soulmate was a murderer. His soulmate wasdead, and Will had killed him.Later, of course, he realized his mistake. But by then it was far too late.Soulmate AU in which Will thinks Garret Jacob Hobbs is his soulmate and Hannibal knows better. Hannigram. Canon-adjacent, at least to start, told in alternating perspective.





	1. Agnition - Will

**Author's Note:**

> I’m slightly uncomfortable with how much I love soulmate AUs, especially since the whole idea of soulmates goes against everything I actually believe IRL, so I tripped and made up a whole bunch of bullshit science to explain it, thus breaking the cardinal rule of soulmate AUs (ie. “don’t overthink it”). Whoops.
> 
> TBH, writing in this fandom is really intimidating since there’s so much amazing stuff out there, but I just discovered the show and I’m too obsessed not to exorcise at least some of that obsession in fanfic form, so this happened. This story feels like a bit of a throwaway, especially since it's less a proper story than a sort of AU fill-in-the-gaps (it may develop into more if I get inspired), but anyway.

This Dark Thing

_I am terrified by this dark thing  
That sleeps in me. _

— “Elm,” Sylvia Plath

* * *

 

**Chapter 1**

**Agnition – Will**

 

* * *

 **ag** **∙ ni** **∙ tion** [ag-nish-uhn] _n._ **1** Biology: the mechanism by which compatibility between two sexually mature unmarked humans is registered and expressed in the form of a character or soul-mark. (see also: **anagnorisis** )

* * *

 

It was evening. Will had killed one person, saved another, and failed to save a third. Now he stood in the bathroom of his motel room, unbuttoning his (borrowed) shirt with fingers that shook. They hadn’t been shaking when he’d fired ten rounds into Garret Jacob Hobbs’ chest. A delayed shock reaction, maybe? He didn’t feel like he was in shock.

He’d showered already at the station after they’d finished taking his statement, but that had been a hasty business, brusque and unthorough. He’d always hated the communal showers back when he was a cop—had always hated anything requiring public nakedness, hated the vulnerability of it, the way it laid some part of his soul—its singularity, its idiosyncrasy—bare.

Not that it was unusual to be unmarked at the age he was then. The median age for agnition was 24 for men, 22 for women (biologists theorized that it was something to do with a combination of sexual potency and emotional stability). But Will had never expected agnition—not really, not for himself. Mates were for people who lived inside their own heads and saw others through their own eyes, not for aberrations like Will, who could steal the mindsets of a thousand people and never truly connect with any of them. Every sideways glance at his (unmarked) chest, every hearty jibe—“Still unmarked, Graham? I could’ve sworn from the way that perp was looking at you… Looks like we’ve got an unrequited in the cells tonight, boys!”—was one more reminder of what he was. And what he _was_ was abnormal. Matchless. _Singular_.

Still, it would have seemed even more abnormal to refuse the offer of a wash and a change of clothes when there was so much blood on him. Blood on his face, his hands, his clothes, his glasses—blood everywhere, and none of it from the man he’d killed. Strange, that. So he’d rinsed himself off as quickly as he could and hurried back to the motel.

Now he saw what a lousy job he’d done of it, looking down at the dark half-moons of dried blood beneath his fingernails. He could still smell it, a rich, irony tang that was less a scent than the memory of taste, from when he’d touched his lips with his tongue and brought the savor of salt back into his mouth, or from when he’d stripped in the changing room of the police station, biting down on the inside of his cheek until it bled. That had been, in its way, a relief—if he was going to taste blood in his mouth, better that it was his own.

He grimaced and went to the sink, rinsing his mouth out yet again. It didn’t help. The smell—or its memory—lingered. As he straightened, he inadvertently caught his gaze in the mirror and was transfixed by the distance in his stare. It wasn’t the gaze of a teacher, or even an FBI special agent, but of a soldier—a thousand yards of bombs and blood-churned earth. He turned his face away, squeezing his eyes shut, and finished undressing in self-imposed darkness.

His eyes remained shut as he showered, but for those cursed with imagination, there was always something worse waiting behind closed lids. He imagined the water touching his body and coming away stained, swirls of rust-red disappearing down the drain.

The water was hot, but the pressure was low. He thought of the blood pumping from the wound in Louise Hobbs’ neck—that had been hot too, though it had cooled quickly, tacky and viscous on his skin. It wasn’t hard to imagine that it was blood and not water that fell from the showerhead now, pooling at his feet, baptizing him in red.

Will opened his eyes, squinting down at the droplets clear as rainwater sliding down his wrist, carving rivers in the fine hair of his arm. Then he snorted and switched off the shower.

He missed his dogs. He missed his life, the solitude of it. Jack had only called him back for the one case, but Will knew it wouldn’t stop there—he’d read it on the man’s face when he was giving his statement earlier that day. Will was too useful to be allowed to languish in a classroom.

He couldn’t even bring himself to disagree.

He toweled himself off, pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of boxers, brushed his teeth, and climbed into bed. It was then that he allowed himself to think of Abigail Hobbs, the girl he had rescued.

The girl he had orphaned.

He’d call Alana and have her fill in for him at Quantico, and go and see Abigail tomorrow.

It wasn’t until the following morning that he saw it, and then it was completely by chance. He was in the bathroom shaving, towel around his waist, head tilted back, when a sudden image flashed into his mind of another neck, another blade—the sudden shock of color as Garret Jacob Hobbs opened his daughter’s throat and once more Will was looking down the barrel of a gun, finger curled tight around the trigger. His hand twitched as if in memory of recoil and now his throat was red too. Will cursed and dropped the razor, gathering a wad of toilet paper to staunch the bleeding. The wound was small but prolific, a steady trickle of blood flowing down his neck and into the dip of his collarbone. He swiped at it with a wet washcloth, rising on the balls of his feet and leaning forward to be sure he hadn’t missed any.

His neck and chest were clean, but for a narrow black mark, rising from somewhere on his chest and coming to a point just below the hollow of his throat. He rubbed at it with the washcloth until his skin was pink and tender. The mark remained.

The sound of his own heartbeat loud in his ears, Will slowly lowered his head to stare at his chest. A sudden roaring filled his ears and he squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them, the sight that met his eyes was the same one as before. The right side of his chest was bare as ever, but the left was overlaid with a sprawl of dark pigmentation, centered just over his heart. It was, unmistakably, a soul-mark.

His questing fingers found the edge of the counter and he clutched at it. This didn’t necessarily mean what he was afraid it meant. When was the last time he’d actually seen himself bare-chested? The mark could be weeks old for all he knew—could designate anyone, any chance-met encounter, from the driver who cut him off at an intersection two weeks ago to one of the security guards at the Minneapolis airport. It could, he told himself, it _could_ , and knew that it wasn’t and it didn’t.

The bathroom mirror was too small and too high to be of any use, but there was a larger one above the dresser in the main room. Will drew in a deep breath and let it out on an exhale, then walked out of the room.

He’d thought he was prepared for the sight that greeted him. He was wrong. His knees trembled and he sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. His reflection sat across from him, curls darkened by damp and plastered to his head, skin whiter than he’d ever seen it. A bloodied bit of toilet paper was stuck to his throat, and on his chest… on his chest was an enormous stag’s head, as black as if it had been seared into his flesh, antlers spreading across once-unblemished skin like the roots of some great tree.

He brought a trembling hand to his chest, tracing the contours of the character. He’d half-expected—half- _hoped_ —to find it raised or rough or sore to the touch—anything to let him classify the mark as something unnatural, something external and foreign to him. But the skin beneath his fingertips was healthy and smooth, differentiated only by color from the unmarked skin which surrounded it.

He let out a choked sort of laugh.

There was no more denying it. At thirty-four years of age, Will Graham had found his soulmate. His soulmate was a murderer. His soulmate was _dead_ , and Will had killed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> smh. Poor Will is living out his absolute worst-case scenario here, and it’s like, “oh, you precious puppy, it’s so much worse than you think it is.” 
> 
> Next chapter (whenever I get around to it) takes us back a week or so to Hannibal’s discovery of his soul-mark. (Hanners, unlike the scruff-meister general here, actually bothers to look in the mirror from time to time, so he catches on a lot quicker.)
> 
> If you want to dork out about Hannibal, feel free to hmu @ whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com!


	2. Agnition - Hannibal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I was seriously considering taking this down—like, I never do this, just poop something out and post it on the internet after only one revision. I write 15,000 word outlines and rewrite each chapter twelve times before it even goes to the beta, that’s my M.O. But then I got a bunch of lovely comments (btw, thank you all, you beautiful humans, you) so I was like, ah, fuck it, I’m having fun, let’s see where this goes! :) Just as a combined thank you and warning to expect everything about this story (from updates to plotting) to be haphazard and erratic… The story will probably run alongside canon until it doesn’t—not so much canon divergent (at least thus far) as canon adjacent. 
> 
> This is unbetaed—I take full responsibility for the purpleness of the prose.

** Chapter 2 **

**Agnition – Hannibal**

* * *

**char** **∙ ac** **∙ ter** [kar-ik-ter] _n._ **14** Biology: the physiological expression of agnition. (see also: soul-mark)

* * *

_One week earlier..._

* * *

Hannibal Lecter stood before the mirror, staring at the character stamped clear and bold on his chest.

_This… is an inconvenience._

That was his second thought, born mostly of habit and a certain, stone-cold pragmatism.

His first thought was not a thought at all. It was the shock of electricity through his veins, an all-encompassing influx of energy that made his skin prickle and raised the hairs on the back of his neck, set his heart to fluttering and his hands to shaking. His were surgeon’s hands, rock-steady, unshakable, moving with care and deliberation and a draftsman’s precision, whether his subject was lying insensate on the operating table or wide-awake and keening under his blade. His hands _never_ shook. But just now, for an instant, they had trembled.

_Soulmate._

It was a thought which lay tucked away in some rarely-visited corner of his memory palace. Rarely visited these days, at least.

When he was younger, he had visited it often, fired up with optimism and youthful zeal. He had tried at first to imagine it, that moment of anagnorisis—of recognition. The scenes he envisioned usually took place at night, and they were almost always violent. Impossible that it should be otherwise. Not for him the chance encounter at the galleria or in the piazza—the young girl colliding with an apple-cheeked boy in the market crowd— _Mi scusi, signore!_ —her dark eyes widening with sudden recognition, her blouse artfully gaping so her youthful paramour could watch the mark blossom on her chest like the blush on her dimpled cheeks. No, he was cut from a different cloth entirely, and so too must be his soulmate—how could it be otherwise? Two beings spun of steel and hunger, hiding behind artfully constructed daylight faces. How else could they know each other, without the twin backdrops of blood and night?

But these fantasies soon lost their savour, largely because he could never quite imagine what except in the broadest of terms what his soulmate would be _like_. Oh, he’d _tried_ , picturing dark-haired women with blood on their teeth and death in their Adriatic eyes, slim cherubic boys pocketing a switchblade and laughing through their curls—a thousand permutations of beauty and death. But these feeble constructs slid away from him like water, as if the dark thing that lurked inside him was too great—too many-faceted—for even his own mind to compass.

And so his daydreams had shifted from the _finding_ of his mate to the _having_ of one. Often he fantasized about killing them. It was, after all, the practical solution. Too dangerous to allow such a one to live, who matched Hannibal not only in appetite but (surely) in ruthlessness. And, oh, but the _beauty_ , the art he might make of such a death. He had always admired Dante’s first sonnet, the image of the god of Love feeding the poet’s heart to the fearful beloved. How much more glorious to take the heart for oneself, to pry it, still beating from the lover’s chest? He, unlike Beatrice, would not undertake such a feat lamblike and shrinking. He would be _resplendent_.

_D’esto core ardendo io glorioso trionfalmente pascerò._

That was in the early days, when it had still seemed possible that he might find a mate. He had even wondered, from time to time, if Murasaki had been younger, or he older—if they had met before she met his uncle… But she had borne Robert’s lily on her breast even as he had borne her dagger, and it was all to the good—he had been free to love her without fear of losing himself, of being known too entirely—free too, when the time came, to leave her.

(He had even wondered, in the darkest hours of his loneliness, whether, if Mischa had lived… But that was foolish, he knew. He had loved Mischa as much as he was capable of loving any living creature, but she could never have understood him.)

As he grew older, he fantasized less and less about murdering his mate. The years past and he grew… not _softer_ , precisely, but wistful. It would have been worth a great deal to have someone know him— _see_ him, if only for a moment. Of late, he’d scarcely considered the idea of finding a mate at all, the corridors of that wing of his palace grown dusty with disuse.

And now, after all this time, his mate had arrived. The proof of it was there, stark on the skin of his chest, black as blood in the moonlight.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, he raised his hand and traced the character with his finger—a massive pawprint, almost as large as a grown man’s hand and topped with four jagged spines—the imprint of claws. As a piece of iconography, it was rapidly rising in his estimation—simplistic, perhaps, but eloquent, the vertical drag of the print and the length of the claws suggesting a barely restrained capacity for violence.

And of course, the mark itself was all but immaterial next to the person it signified.

Of who that was, he had no doubt—would have had no doubt even if he hadn’t caught the unmistakable whiff of the canine about the profiler. Who else could it possibly be? Hadn’t he seen even at their first encounter that the man’s mind was extraordinary and worthy of his time and study? Hadn’t he sensed his potential even then?

How _wasted_ he was in the hall of the FBI, where they looked on all his unique genius and termed it a _disorder_ , as if anything so beautiful could be truly broken. Hannibal’s lip curled. They had the audacity to set a wolf to catching rats, and worst of all, they had somehow managed to convince the wolf that he was a terrier.

If he had been capable of feeling pity, he might have felt it for such a poor, mixed-up creature. Undoubtedly, the kindest thing to do would be to put it out of its misery.

But there was no pity in him, no compassion.

Hannibal Lecter was not kind.

Hannibal Lecter was _curious_.

Thus, his third thought upon seeing the mark: _This is an opportunity_.

It occurred to him to wonder whether the profiler had requited him. It seemed extraordinarily unlikely, although Hannibal did not doubt that he _would_ , in time and under Hannibal’s careful guidance. Most of what he saw in Will Graham, after all, was potential. It was hardly a surprise that the man was still unmatched at thirty-four—quite apart from the uniqueness of his mind, he was so twisted-up, so badly repressed, that it would be a wonder if his own subconscious even understood itself well enough to recognize its own match, much less were able to see behind Hannibal’s mask. Yet there was always the possibility… and if Will _should_ see him before he was firmly in Hannibal’s pocket…

This was dangerous—the very danger he’d sought to forestall all those years before, when he would lie awake dreaming up grand and operatic deaths for his soulmate. Yet what he felt now was not apprehension or consternation. No, the shiver that shot tingling up his spine was something more like… _delight_.

Slowly, Hannibal flattened his hand over his heart, palm still slightly cupped, as though cradling something precious. The soul-mark peeped through his splayed fingers like a wild creature peering through the bars of its cage. He thought of the profiler—his _soulmate_ —the skittishness in his blue eyes and the tension in his posture as though constantly readying himself for flight, jaw clenched as though struggling to restrain teeth that wanted nothing more than to snap—to _bite_.

Wild animals could be caged. They could also be trained. Or… they could be unleashed. They could be _set free_.

“ _Will Graham_.”

Hannibal spoke the name aloud, admiring its cadence, testing the weight of it on its tongue.

He smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to balance not going over the top with Hannibal with my head-canon that young adult/teenage Hannibal was the most dramatic, pretentious motherfucker ever to plagiarize Botticelli via murder.
> 
> Mi scusi, signore = Pardon me, sir.
> 
> D’esto core ardendo io glorioso trionfalmente pascerò. = From this burning heart I, glorious, triumphantly shall eat. (An appalling hackjob of Dante’s first sonnet, for which I apologize to the entire nation of Italy and everyone who understands Italian.)
> 
> Also, just to be clear, non-sexual matches happen all the time—soul-marks indicate the potential for a powerful and enduring emotional bond, not necessarily a sexual one. Hannibal isn’t wondering about incest with his sister (although intrafamilial bonds are v rare, platonic or otherwise). It's even more rare for someone to experience agnition after they've already met someone as an adult, like Hannibal seems to expect Will will do, but then, they're both rare specimens. 
> 
> Your kudos and (especially) comments are the fuel that keep my fingers typing!
> 
> Murch lurve,
> 
> Silks


End file.
